Neve Campbell’s controversial return to ‘Scream’: The price of recovering the 1990s horror classic

Neve Campbell is one of modern cinema’s undisputed scream queens. Her reign was short — from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s — but long enough for her howls of terror in the Scream franchise to impact an entire generation. She seemed destined to extend her domain throughout Hollywood, triumphing both on television (Party of Five) and the big screen (Wild Things, Three to Tango), but the Scream franchise weighed her down, and Campbell ended up disappearing from Hollywood’s elite. “People did pigeonhole me,” the Canadian admitted in The Guardian, complaining that for years she only received scripts in the horror genre. After over two decades reconciling starring roles in movies that aspired to generate conversation and supporting roles in TV shows of a different ilk, Campbell, 50, will once again be running away from the masked killer in Scream 7. “To the amazing Scream fans, I hope you are as excited as I am,” she posted on Instagram. But far from arousing fans’ enthusiasm, her return to the iconic franchise has spilled a lot of ink in the press and on social media, making it one of the most talked-about stories in Hollywood lately. Here’s why:

The controversy around Neve Campbell’s role in the movie franchise began just two years ago, when it was announced that her character, Sidney Prescott, would not be part of the sixth installment of the saga. The actress herself was responsible for making it clear that her reason for not returning was strictly economic, claiming that the offer she received undervalued her contribution to the films; she even called it sexist. “I honestly don’t believe that if I were a man and had done five installments of a huge blockbuster franchise over 25 years, that the number that I was offered would be the number that would be offered to a man. And in my soul, I just couldn’t do that. I couldn’t walk on set feeling that — feeling undervalued and feeling the unfairness, or lack of fairness, around that,” she told People. Despite her absence, Scream 6 became one of the franchise’s biggest critical and box office successes, thanks to its new leading female duo.

Just a few months after the film’s premiere, when it seemed that the generational change at the helm of the iconic slasher was in good hands with actresses Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera, the latter’s statements about the war between Israel and Hamas sparked one of the biggest controversies in recent Hollywood. Barrera was fired by the film’s production company, Spyglass, after denouncing on social media “the genocide and ethnic cleansing” that Israel is committing against the Palestinian people. The company asserted that it had " zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form,” to which the Mexican actress replied that “silence was not an option” for her and that she condemned “both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.” Barrera is not alone: other stars, including Susan Sarandon and model Gigi Hadid, have also lost jobs for rejecting the Israeli government’s actions in the Gaza Strip.

The following day, Jenna Ortega, who had become one of Hollywood’s brightest young stars for her work in the Netflix series Wednesday, also resigned from the film. Although there has been much speculation about the real reasons — her withdrawal from the project was first alleged to be for scheduling reasons and then for economic reasons — the timing just after Barrera’s dismissal and her public thanks to Ortega for always being there for her suggest that it is a sympathetic response to what happened to her costar. Further plunging the project into chaos, a few weeks later the director of Scream 7, Christopher Landon, resigned as well. “It was a dream job that turned into a nightmare,” he confirmed on X (formerly Twitter).

To try to revitalize a film that seemed doomed to ostracism, the producers decided to resort to nostalgia, putting the film in the hands of two of the franchise’s most important figures with Kevin Williamson (the screenwriter of the first, second and fourth installments) as director, and Neve Campbell as the absolute protagonist (after giving her a check in line with her demands, we assume). Her return has generated an uproar on social media, where she has been accused of being a “traitor” for agreeing to replace Barrera with users announcing a future boycott of the project. “Neve Campbell, you should be ashamed of yourself. How desperate do you have to be to work with a company that not just refused to pay you fairly but also supports a genocide and fired Melissa Barrera, the lead, for denouncing it?” said a tweet with over 10,000 likes on X.

Trained in classical dance at Canada’s National Ballet School, injuries cut Campbell’s promising future on stage short and redirected her career to drama when she was 15 years old. Dance remains her great passion. “I never wanted to be an actor,” she said. At the height of her career, the actress made another bold decision and chose to leave Hollywood to move to London with her then-husband actor John Light (they separated in 2005). “It all hit so fast and so big that it was a little overwhelming — wonderful, obviously, and I’m very grateful for it. But it got to a level also where the kinds of things that I was being offered were not the kinds of things I want to do. I was constantly being offered horror films, because I was known for horror films. Or bad romantic comedies. I just wasn’t interested in the scripts, and I was feeling a bit unhappy with the things that were coming to me. And I was feeling a little bored with the whole thing,” she explained on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

The Canadian actress was only 22 years old when she first escaped from the killer Ghostface in Scream, although she was already a familiar face by virtue of the success of the show Party of Five. Campbell says that her frenetic schedule on the show, with daily shoots of over 14 hours, saved her from losing herself in a spiral of addictions. Her rise to fame was immediate: magazines like FHM, Esquire and People included her at the top of their lists of the sexiest women in the world several years in a row, and she graced the cover of Rolling Stone under the headline, “Red-Hot Party Girl.” But despite the attempts to build an erotic myth around her, Campbell has had an anti-nudity clause for all of her film work since the beginning of her career. “I feel it has nothing to do with the film itself. I feel it’s for box office draws and I have an issue with it ,” she observed. Campbell is in a relationship with fellow actor JJ Field, with whom she has two sons, Caspian, 11, and Raynor, 5. The actress is estimated to have a fortune of around $10 million.

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